A biased look at psychology in the world

November 22, 2009

Protecting The Children (Part 2)

The comic book industry hardly took Wertham's
criticism in stride though. Not only did publishers hire private
detectives to investigate his past, these detectives also
harassed Wertham's colleagues at his clinic. According to an
unfortunately-worded editorial written in the comic book industry
newsletter Quest, "The immediate enemy is Fredric Wertham, not
some other publisher. He cannot be reasoned with. He must be
discredited and rendered ineffective. Will he go away?Probably not.
He must be knocked out". Wertham was sufficiently alarmed by the
editorial to send a copy to New York's police commissioner.

Based
on the Senate hearings, the Comic Code Authority was established in
1954 to regulate comic book content. Until it was revised in the
1970s, the Code banned all graphic descriptions of violence, gore, and
sexual innuendo in comic books.; It also banned any negative
representation of authority figures and stipulated that "in every
instance, good should triumph over evil" as well as any representation
of kidnapping or concealed weapons. EC Comics only survived by
focusing on its only non-horror title, Mad Magazine (which savagely parodied Fredric Wertham for years afterward).

Wertham's influence was hardly limited to the United States
alone. Child
welfare agencies in Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and elsewhere
began to call for restrictions on the importing of American comic
books (partly out of concern for the violent content and partly to
protect their own domestic comic book industries). Articles in British,
Canadian, and Australian newspapers routinely denounced American comic
books as being equivalent to a "narcotic"
administering steadily greater shocks that desensitized children to
violence. Women's groups, educators, the Catholic Church, and various
other special interest groups formed alliances designed to
counter the comic book menace on an international scale. Fredric
Wertham's writings were extensively quoted in speeches and radio
broadcasts around the world and government panels weighed in on the
concerns that anti-comics crusaders raised. By the late 1950s,
government regulating bodies for comic books were established across
North America as well as various European and Asian countries.

The passing of the Comic Code Authority represented Fredric
Wertham's greatest achievement (even if he protested that the
regulation didn't go far enough). He would never be as influential
again despite his efforts to expand his crusade to include other forms
of media violence. In 1959, he attempted to publish a followup to his
earlier book to focus on television violence but no publishers were
interested. Despite occasional television appearances and articles in
popular newspapers, his career as a media pundit was effectively over.
Wertham continued writing on juvenile delinquency and the power of
media until his death in 1981. Later social scientists tend to
dismiss his work as being without scientific merit and comic book fans
remember him only as a conservative demagogue and an advocate of
censorship (one comic book writer referred to him as the "Josef Mengele
of funnybooks"). To this day, comic book writers continue to parody
Wertham and his crusade in various forms.

And yet...

Whatever
we try to make of Fredric Wertham, he was hardly your typical
demagogue. An early supporter of desegregation (and a personal friend
of Ralph Ellison), Wertham's writing on race relationswere used as
testimony in the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education case which overturned
school segregation in the United States. In his 1966 book, A Sign for Cain,
he linked racism to the genocidal policies of Nazi psychiatrists in the
forced euthanasia of mental patients. Heended the book with a
powerful message for abolishing the death penalty and his own
philosophy of social reform. He even tried to reach out to the comic
book subculture with his support of fanzines although fans refused to
forgive him for his role in undermining the industry. Throughout his
lifetime, Fredric Wertham placed his reputation on the line to support
unpopular causes and to defend what he believed to be right.

While
he is mainly remembered by the anti-comics crusade, his role as an
early pioneer in the role of media in influencing behaviour can't be
denied, even if you disagree with his views. It was Fredric Wertham
who took comic books seriously enough as a cultural medium to address
their impact on the children for which they had been written (something
no other social scientist had bothered to do before). Whether his
crusade was completely without value is open to argument.